Facebook AI Tool to Detect Suicidal Thoughts

Until now, the social networking websites are only for communication. But, the most popular social network service provider Facebook took a step further and decided to prevent suicidal attempts. Aiming at this target, Facebook started to use AI (Artificial Intelligence) to identify the users having suicidal intentions.

In one of the Facebook’s blog post, it is clearly mentioned about adopting “Proactive Detection Efforts” in order to assist the users expressing suicidal thoughts. Initially, pattern recognition is being implemented to identify posts or videos with the suicidal intentions.

After identifying the risk, it alarms the human reviewer’s team available for 24/7, to reach out to the Individuals and prevent self-harm.

According to Guy Rosen, VP of product management blog post "This approach uses pattern recognition technology to help identify posts and live streams as likely to be expressing thoughts of suicide"

Facebook is already implementing few tools to identify persons intending for self-harm. Now the software used may even detect other signs that human brain may not identify.

Few sources even revealed the fact that Facebook is associating with few mental health organizations to get ideas of signs that people may report before suicidal attempts.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a post reporting to building global community "There have been terribly tragic events - like suicides, some live-streamed - that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner."

In other blog posts, it is mentioned as "We are also using AI to prioritize the order in which our team reviews reported posts, videos, and live streams. This ensures we can get the right resources to people in distress and, where appropriate, we can more quickly alert first responders"

Though it is known fact that AI tools are being used to accomplish this task, but it is not providing in-depth details. For instance how the tool actually works to judge the person in suicidal risk.

However, it is good to know that Facebook has taken an initiative to do something good and reach people before something fatal happens.